Beatles (39 page)

‘When you write, you’ve got to lie, too,’ he said. ‘Just like Goose did that time when he wrote about the suicide in Bygdøy.’

‘Ye-es,’ I said. ‘Of course. But the secret is to lie well.’

‘Well, you would know,’ Seb smiled. ‘You’re the best liar of us all.’

Then we played
Sergeant Pepper
and I started to unravel because Nina was in those grooves, and Cecilie was, too, in negative form, an absence, and we each sank into our own gloom and said nothing for several hours.

Then Seb said, ‘I fought for Guri once. D’you remember?’

‘Course I do. How’s your grandma by the way?’

‘Alright. She shows up when Dad’s away.’

We played ‘A Day In The Life’ again.

‘Any progress with Cecilie?’ Seb asked.

‘I’m a fetid sausage on her platter,’ I said.

‘Oh, boy,’ Seb said. ‘I’m gonna use that one.’

He jotted things down in a little book till the sparks flew. Then he grabbed his harmonica, flicked the hair off his forehead and hollered away.

He stopped.

‘What rhymes with platter?’

‘Matter,’ I said.

‘Jeez.’

He blew up a seventh.

We took it again, and I sang. I really went for it, roared the moss off my lungs. Seb was red in the face, stomping with his stockinged foot. Seb and Kim, the Blues Howlers.

‘We’ll have to write more verses,’ he said afterwards.

‘About slalom snobs,’ I said.

‘And sneaky school newspaper editors and lousy girls.’

They were in for it now. No one was safe now.

‘Heads will roll,’ Seb pronounced prophetically.

On the day I saw Kåre suck up to Cecilie and inveigle her into a conversation that lasted a whole break I decided to write a letter to Nina. I had received four and sent none. I sat in my room writing all evening while thinking about Kåre and Cecilie; childhood friends, ex-sweethearts, that’s what they were, I was sure, she knew I had seen them together. I wrote a letter to Nina. About how boring school was, about whether she had heard The Doors, if there were lots of hippies in Copenhagen. Wrote until my ears buzzed. But said nothing about why I hadn’t replied earlier.

Folded it up and popped it into an envelope. My mother was at the door.

‘Are you doing your homework?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I was into monosyllables.

Mum tiptoed in and took a seat behind me.

‘You’re not still depressed about the letter from the headmaster, are you, Kim?’ she said, and I loved her for that, but couldn’t show it, just couldn’t bloody do it.

‘No,’ I said.

‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said.

Kind words.

I slipped the letter under a book.

‘The girl… the girl you… were talking about… who is she?’

Would have loved to talk too, relieve some of the pain, but there was a padlock on my mouth, a Jubilee clip round my larynx. I coughed and squirmed. Couldn’t tell her the whole story about the school newspaper, either, on the contrary, I was desperately hoping they would never get their hands on a copy of
The Wild West,
I think Dad would have expired on the spot. And that’s how it was, there was no conversation, as though we could not talk to each other any more, and the only comprehensible sounds to human ears came from Dad in the sitting room as he yelled, ‘Tell him to get a haircut. Tell him to get a haircut
now
!’

‘Jesus had long hair,’ I said.

The next day I sent the letter to Nina.

In April a new Beatles single came out. I wended my way down to Bygdøy Allé and bought it at Radionette. They had got quite a long way with the new building down from Gimle where the supermarket was going to be. I went home and played the record in peace and quiet. I was pretty enthusiastic. ‘Lady Madonna’. Yes. It was up to scratch. I gave Seb a call and played it over the telephone. He was pretty enthusiastic, wasn’t hanging from the ceiling, but the music held up, a pro job, resting on their laurels, they had every right. The piano swung. We discussed whether it was Paul or Ringo singing. It was Paul, might have had a cold. Dank climate in England in the winter. Anything else? Seb was working on a few new texts. He had borrowed Jan Erik Vold from the library.

‘The snow’s meltin’,’ I said. ‘Won’t be able to slalom in Kleiva now.’

Seb sighed down the line.

‘Have you turned meteorologist or what? Heard of water skis? The creep’s got a homestead on Hankø in the fjord with fifty horses. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.’

He was quiet for a moment.

‘What rhymes with homestead?’ he asked at length.

‘Dead,’ I replied.

‘I’m slowly losin’ the will to live,’ he said.

‘What about bread?’ I suggested.

‘That’s more like it.’

We rang off. I gave the disc another spin. The B side. ‘The Inner Light’. I was depressed, it was another useless Tuesday, crappy, boring, one of the days you could give a miss, drop completely, a grey hole in time. A Tuesday in April, 1968. Leftovers for dinner and a couple of jibes across the table about hair and clothes, pathetic they were, too. Homework. English. French.
Passé simple
. Kipling. If. Norwegian. Sagas. Filthy windows, nasty smell from Frogner Bay, sore balls, impossible to concentrate on anything. Lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Not a lot to look at. Strange the silence coming from Jensenius. A door slams somewhere. Squeals of a car braking. But nothing has anything to do with me, one boring Tuesday in April, 1968.

The doorbell rang, but I couldn’t even be bothered to shift my carcass, probably just a salesman trying to palm off some Tupperware on Mum. I heard someone come inside and then there was a knock on the cell door. I leapt to my feet. Cecilie was standing there. Cecilie. It was incredible. That such a Tuesday could bring Cecilie. Mum was standing in the wings peering in, Dad’s head was there, too, I quickly locked the door, had no idea what to say.

‘Cecilie,’ I said.

She looked around as if she had come to rent the room. Looked at the records. The books. The clothes on the floor. The slippers, my idiotic slippers, looked like two ducklings with a red ball on the beak.

I padded around barefoot, socks were full of holes. Would have to cut my nails soon. Embarrassing situation.

Say something.

‘Are you hungry?’

She sniggered quietly and sat down.

‘He’s explained everything,’ she said, looking up at me.

‘Explained what?’

‘About you and the girl in Copenhagen, that it’s been over for some time.’

‘Who has?’

‘What?’

‘Who has explained what?’

‘Ola, of course.’

‘Ola?’

I sat beside her on the sofa.

‘Seemed it was sort of his fault,’ she said. ‘But now he’s explained everything.’

She looked at me. With gentle eyes.

‘Ola,’ was all I could say.

She laughed again:

‘It’s taken quite a long time, but I’ve got there!’

Ola, my Ola! Comes in with a whimper and goes out with a roar! We caressed each other, ended up in a passionate embrace. She let me go for a moment, leaned back and tidied her face.

‘It was a rotten trick Kåre played on you,’ she said.

I felt the time was ripe to be fair to the enemy. Could afford to be now.

‘At least he admitted his guilt,’ I said. ‘Over the skeleton business.’

She nodded.

‘I thought you were cheating on me,’ she said, not mincing her words.

‘Course not,’ I stammered, raising my hand.

‘So it was over a long time ago then?’ she said with eyes cast down.

‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly remembering the letter I had sent, and my stomach started to churn.

‘Yes,’ I repeated, as if the words could change anything at all.

Cecilie looked at me.

‘Lies and dishonesty are the worst things I know,’ she said in a serious tone.

‘But you lie to your parents,’ I suggested gently.

She sniggered.

‘That’s not the same. I’ve always done that. It’s best for them.’

Always done that. My stomach gave a new lurch. Must have lied about many more before me, a whole bunch of them, I’m going to see Kåre, I’m going to see Kåre, and then she had gone somewhere else, to secret assignations, the back row in the cinema, in an out-of-the-way park on the other side of the town. I started to touch her, my hands ran wild, she pulled away with a laugh.

‘Yes,’ I said and had no idea why I was saying ‘yes’.

‘Are we friends again then?’ she asked, simple as that.

Friends.

‘Yes,’ I said again, leaning across her.

Afterwards I played her the new Beatles record. She listened without much interest, talked about a singer who was even better than Simon and Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen his name was. Had never heard of him. She could play a few chords on the guitar.

I played the record again. It was a run-of-the-mill letter I sent, nothing dangerous, like a postcard you sent to friends and family on holiday, to prove you were still alive, a weather report, wouldn’t cause a problem.

I calmed down.

‘Lady Madonna,’ I said.

‘What?’

I had my head in her lap.

‘Lady Madonna,’ I said. ‘You’re my Lady Madonna.’

Thought that sounded cool. But I’m not sure that she liked it.

She was quiet for a while, then looked down at my face.

Stroked my eyebrows.

‘You’re sweet,’ she said.

Not sure that I liked that.

‘Lady Madonna,’ I repeated.

Then she lowered her mouth and her hair fell over me like a thin, freshly washed curtain.

Spring arrived with a vengeance, worse than ever before. I bought twenty bottles of Export for Jensenius and he held a damned concert until late in the night when the cops had to come and restrain him. After that Jensenius was quiet. But the sun continued, ripped up the winter by the roots, and bikes and bands streamed into the streets like animals emerging from hibernation. Cecilie and I kept the pot boiling with clandestine, stolen trysts on misty, sultry evenings that were not as warm as you thought, which necessitated closeness and initiative. She visited me sometimes, out of the blue, without warning, and one evening I went to hers in Bygdøy.

Alexander the Great and wife were at the opening of an exhibition in the Trade Fair Hall and the palace was unoccupied. We sat
in the hammock in the garden, swinging and drinking orange juice. I peered up at the roof, went weak at the knees, it was steeper than the landing section of the Holmenkollen ski jump. Otherwise the garden wasn’t bad, the grass had been manicured with nail scissors and the lawn was the size of a golf course. The apple trees stood on the horizon like white ghosts and my knees went weak again. Apples. Hadn’t heard anything from Nina after I had sent the letter, not so strange though, it was a pretty stupid letter. Cecilie told me about the gardener whose name was Carlsberg. He had
green fingers,
Cecilie said. Carlsberg is Danish beer, I said. I shouldn’t have said that, that’s obvious. Cecilie was offended and immediately got off the hammock. So I was forced to perform resuscitation, after half an hour everything was fine again as a rule. It was quite strange really because she wanted to hear about this Nina, as she called her, she would beg me to talk about her, she was curious and scared at one and the same time, and I did talk, but it didn’t do to tell too much, to warm to the topic, tricky area, a fine line, worse than walking on her roof. But this evening she didn’t want to hear about Nina. At first we had to do some homework together and afterwards we could play records. Quiet evening. We lay in the grass with our English and French books, testing each other on vocabulary.

‘What do you think of
Victoria?
’ she asked after some time.

‘Boring,’ I said.

She looked disappointed.

‘I think it’s beautiful,’ she said to the sky.

‘Would never have thought Sphinx would choose schmaltz like that,’ I persisted.

‘Would have liked to know the miller’s son,’ Cecilie sighed.

‘They make it more difficult than it needs to be, don’t they,’ I said, and caught myself feeling stupid. ‘Anyway, it’s only a book,’ I added.

Cecilie lay daydreaming, the spring murk was on its way, a light cloud scudded across the sky.

‘I’ll fetch the record player,’ she said, running in.

She brought her guitar as well. And Leonard Cohen. She couldn’t get enough of Leonard Cohen. And the whole time she was staring at the picture of this dark, tragic man with the spiritual resonance that girls would queue up for.

I was pissed off.

‘Don’t you like Leonard, either?’ Cecilie asked with resignation in her voice.

On Christian name terms.

‘Schmaltz,’ I said. ‘The same old schmaltz all the time.’

She turned her back on me and played the B side. I couldn’t hear the difference.

‘You only like The Beatles, you do,’ she said.

‘True,’ I said.

I was in that mood.

We didn’t say any more. When the record had finished she took the guitar in her lap and strummed. I liked her better then, well, I liked her best of all then, when she tried to play the guitar, because she couldn’t, and that gave me a bit of a frisson, watching her do something at which she was completely hopeless.

She strummed with her nails, moved her left hand into contorted positions with her fingers sticking out in all directions and pressed the strings. However, as far as fingers are concerned, I can’t talk, my index finger stuck up in the air like a misshapen question mark, and I was glad Cecilie didn’t ask about that.

Then she began to sing in English.

It sounded forlorn.

Loved her at that moment.

After finishing, she stared vacantly into the distance as though listening to an echo.

I hugged her.

‘That was great,’ I said.

‘You’re lying,’ she said.